The US lockdown may not have had any impact. Mobility trends are disconnected from government orders. The people more likely stemmed the tide in the US more than any government action.
Sweden is just marginally worse off against Covid overall than the US. And they didn’t have to spend $4 trillion or lose 40 million jobs to achieve that.
Sweden took less drastic action than the US. Sweden did take some action early, encouraging social distancing, increased hand hygiene etc. Then again, in Sweden you can take sick leave with full pay. More people will stay home if they feel sick.
Parts of the US took more drastic actions, but very, very late (during a pandemic where number of cases double every 4-5 days, one week is late, several weeks is very late). Shutting down borders to foreigners doesn't cut it when the virus is already spreading in the communities.
While they ended up in almost the same place, you really cannot compare them. The Swedish circumstances are so different from those of the US, that you cannot expect the Swedish same strategy to work the same way in the US.
And before you claim that the Swedish strategy is a success, consider how Sweden compares to its Nordic neighbors, where you can compare the circumstances.
Per 1,000,000 inhabitants:
Sweden 4042 cases, 450 deaths
Denmark 2040 cases, 101 deaths
Finland 1247 cases, 58 deaths
Norway 1567 cases, 44 deaths>Leaders in some European countries have suggested enforcing tough lockdown measures early in the COVID-19 outbreak may not have been entirely necessary.
>Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg said during a television interview last week with state broadcaster NRK that its approach had been over cautious.
>“I probably took many of the decisions out of fear. Worst case scenarios became controlling,” Ms Solberg explained.
>She assured viewers that strict restrictions were imposed based on the international state of the disease at the time, but said that on reflection perhaps they were misguided.
[0] https://au.news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-norway-pm-regrets-not-...
That's the beautiful thing about these almost meaningless cross-country comparisons - the data is so low-quality and heterogenous that you can pick a pair of countries and validate pretty much every hypothesis with it.
- for cases: how widespread was the testing? How quickly did it ramp up (e.g. how many tests per 1M in relation to 1000th case)?
- for deaths: what counts as a COVID death? Is death with COVID = death from COVID?
- how soon after the onset of the epidemic in the particular country were lockdown measures enacted? How long did they last? How stringent were they in reality vs on paper?
There are many countries who figured out how to play this numbers game. Russia, for example, faithfully reports any and all cases of COVID and simultaneously employs every trick in the book to minimize the number of deaths. They have already and will continue to win propaganda points from people who then use these meaningless death numbers to compare to another country's far more accurate death numbers and proceed to draw garbage conclusions from garbage data.
If your argument is that “it doesn’t make that much of a difference choosing between doing nothing and pursuing a bungled, haphazard response,” then sure, a lot would probably agree with you. But these are not the only choices any of these countries had.
The economic damage is part and parcel of the overall mismanagement, which is why Taiwan and South Korea are doing better with both handling the pandemic and the state of their economies.
In context of the European response Sweden is doing just fine. Japan and Korea have a different culture around surveillance than people in America or Europe. What worked in those two countries isn't relevant because Europeans and Americans reject that kind of surveillance.
Sweden has done about as well as any other western country in regard to the coronavirus and they did it without ruining their economy.
Sometimes I think people here on HN are just hoping the economy will tank.
You also can’t really shift goal posts comparing Taiwan to Sweden because we’re talking about a global pandemic that originated in China. It honestly doesn’t matter who’s doing best in Europe if people are better off in SE Asia, both in terms of economic damage and that caused by disease. Hand-waiving at “cultural differences” seems mostly an excuse because there is as much difference in culture between the high-performing countries in Asia as there is between the low-performing ones in Europe.
https://dailycaller.com/2020/05/20/jp-morgan-infection-rates...
Sweden is about middle of the pack. Most of that is because of the virus getting into care homes, which a lockdown can't prevent anyway given the staff have to come and go, and blocking the elderly from all visits forever is deeply inhumane. Given their age many of them would rather catch the virus than live longer but always be alone, and have said so.
So far it appears lockdowns didn't affect the virus much at all. However, they are definitely killing people if you look at the changes in suicide rates, the backlogs for cancer treatment that have built up and so on.
The problem with believing that Taiwan and South Korea are doing better for fundamental reasons is that it may simply be random. Japan did very little or nothing, probably due to trying to avoid the Olympics getting cancelled, and had similarly good results. The differences in testing levels and definitions between countries alone make comparisons based on reported infection and death rates meaningless.
This claim doesn't pass the sniff test, doesn't match a clear signal that anyone can see on graphs of data from Wuhan, NYC and Italy as well as other US states, and doesn't comport with our basic understanding of how infectious disease spreads. The fact that it's featured in a political website that uses the words "research... allegedly found" in its first sentence is just the cherry on top.
I don't really know how to answer your other objections. Their analysis looked at more countries than your list, your "sniff test" isn't a substitute for actual analysis, and the fact that a wide range of news websites summarised the results is to be expected (the actual report appears to have been sent to clients rather than posted on the web).
Here's a different source for you:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8347635/Lockdowns-f...
Taiwan and South Korea being random seems a spurious claim. Taiwan’s Vice President is an epidemiologist invested with a great deal of executive authority in dealing with public health crises and has guided the country’s response from the outset. South Korea was trending in a quite bad direction with the church outbreaks and quashed them through massive interventions in testing and mobile hospital capacity. And neither country has mass-scale lockdowns like the west (because they didn’t need them).
Other countries can invest in the same readiness. It's always a decision of limited resources and many opportunity costs (poverty, infrastructure, climate, security, etc).
Different countries with different experiences and difference cultures will make different decisions. That's ok, that's how it should work. Can't have it any other way in a democracy, right?
Sure, but both South Korea and Taiwan are wealthy liberal democracies. I know this isn’t your intention, but a lot of commentators seem to appeal to some kind of Western exceptionalism, completely refusing the examples of SE Asia democracies as a valid measure of comparison. To me, that seems like insanity, because again, they’re also wealthy liberal democracies and have had the best-in-class responses thus far.
The US lockdown had concrete effect, limiting cases to what the hospitals could manage. Further, we understand more now (1000's of studies and papers published in a few months).
To compare blindly ignoring the disease and crossing fingers (Sweden's approach) vs wait-measure-respond, I know which way I prefer.